Mar 24, 2008

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starvinghysterical naked,dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angryfix,angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to thestarry dynamo in the machinery of night,who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in thesupernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops ofcities contemplating jazz,who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angelsstaggering on tenement roofs illuminated,who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkan-sas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odeson the windows of the skull,who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money inwastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a beltof marijuana for New York,who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, orpurgatoried their torsos night after nightwith dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock andendless balls,incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mindleaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the mo-tionless world of Time between,Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunk-enness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neonblinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaringwinter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light ofmind,who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holyBronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children broughtthem down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brainall drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo,who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's floated out and satthrough the stale beer afternoon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to thecrack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevueto museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fireescapes off windowsills of Empire State out of the moon,yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories andanecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights withbrilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement,who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguouspicture postcards of Atlantic City Hall,suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grindings and migraines ofChina under junk-withdrawal in Newark's bleak furnished room,who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard wonder-ing where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts,who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow towardlonesome farms in grandfather night,who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy and bop kabbalahbecause the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary indian angelswho were visionary indian angels,who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernaturalecstasy,who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on the impulseof winter midnight streetlight smalltown rain,who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex orsoup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about Americaand Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa,who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving behind nothing butthe shadow of dungarees and the lava and ash of poetry scattered infireplace Chicago,who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the FBI in beards and shortswith big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incompre-hensible leaflets,who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco hazeof Capitalism,who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping andundressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down, andwailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed,who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling beforethe machinery of other skeletons,who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars forcommitting no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty andintoxication,who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roofwaving genitals and manuscripts,who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, andscreamed with joy,who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses ofAtlantic and Caribbean love,who balled in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the grass ofpublic parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whom-ever come who may,who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behinda partition in a Turkish Bath when the blond & naked angel came topierce them with a sword,who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrewof the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of thewomb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her assand snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman's loom.who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of beer a sweetheart apackage of cigarettes a candle and fell off the bed, and continuedalong the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall witha vision of ultimate cunt and come eluding the last gyzym of con-sciousness,who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, andwere red eyed in the morning but prepared to sweeten the snatch ofthe sunrise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake,who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars, N.C.,secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver--joy tothe memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots & dinerbackyards, moviehouses' rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves orwith gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings& especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleystoo,who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on asudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up out of basements hung-over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams& stumbled to unemployment offices,who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the snowbank dockswaiting for a door in the East River to open to a room full of steam-heat and opium,who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment cliff-banks of the Hud-son under the wartime blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shallbe crowned with laurel in oblivion,who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested the crab at the muddybottom of the rivers of Bowery,who wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts full of onionsand bad music,who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge, and rose up tobuild harpsichords in their lofts,

who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame under thetubercular sky surrounded by orange crates of theology,who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which inthe yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish,who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht & tortillas dreamingof the pure vegetable kingdom,who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg,who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outsideof Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the nextdecade,who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up andwere forced to open antique stores where they thought they weregrowing old and cried,who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenueamid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regi-ments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertis-ing & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run downby the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walkedaway unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatownsoup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the subway window,jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on negroes, cried all over thestreet, danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed phonographrecords of nostalgic European 1930s German jazz finished the whis-key and threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans in their earsand the blast of colossal steamwhistles,who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to the each other'shotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation,who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or youhad a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity,who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver& waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded & loned inDenver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Denveris lonesome for her heroes,who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other's salva-tion and light and breasts, until the soul illuminated its hair for asecond,who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for impossible criminalswith golden heads and the charm of reality in their hearts who sangsweet blues to Alcatraz,who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky Mount to tender Buddhaor Tangiers to boys or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive orHarvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the daisychain or grave,who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism & were left withtheir insanity & their hands & a hung jury,who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism and subsequentlypresented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse withshaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instanta-neous lobotomy,and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin Metrazol electricityhydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy pingpong & am-nesia,who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic pingpong table,resting briefly in catatonia,returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood, and tears andfingers, to the visible madman doom of the wards of the madtownsof the East,Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid halls, bickering with theechoes of the soul, rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-benchdolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare, bodies turned tostone as heavy as the moon,with mother finally ******, and the last fantastic book flung out of thetenement window, and the last door closed at 4 a.m. and the lasttelephone slammed at the wall in reply and the last furnished roomemptied down to the last piece of mental furniture, a yellow paperrose twisted on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that imaginary,nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination--ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you're really in thetotal animal soup of time--and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flashof the alchemy of the use of the ellipse the catalog the meter & thevibrating plane,who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through imagesjuxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visualimages and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash ofconsciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater OmnipotensAeterna Deusto recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand beforeyou speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yetconfessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in hisnaked and endless head,the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down herewhat might be left to say in time come after death,and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadowof the band and blew the suffering of America's naked mind for loveinto an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shiveredthe cities down to the last radiowith the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodiesgood to eat a thousand years.

[Personal Note: I'm not a huge fan of Ginsberg but, his first Howl poem is one of the best poems I've ever read. My personal preferences are short poems but, Howl and its length kept me riveted to every word. Read More about Allen Ginsberg]

Who or What Am I?

A Baby Boomer by birth, with lots to say. Political views voiced can go either way, not a die-hard political follower but, when something irks me...gloves are off.
I'm neither Democrat nor Republican, both sides tend to irritate me.When I vote, I vote for the lesser of the two evils or I'll vote for my self.
As a Disabled Veteran I've traveled the world, now I'm traveling along cyberspace and blog what I say and say what I blog -- simple as that.
Come and converse with me -- you know you want too!
I blog what I say and say what I blog -- simple as that
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